Enterprise Parts Management

​XSB PartLink

Effective parts management for an enterprise requires an accurate, consistent and up-to-date view of product data, internally across multiple divisions of the company, and externally across its suppliers and customers. Enterprises use and maintain multiple legacy database systems to support their management of component parts. These systems often contain inconsistent, redundant and obsolete parts information, which eventually results in sub-optimal decisions at all points in the product life cycle.

Organizations make a significant investment in their ERP systems. These systems provide important benefits in managing enterprise business functions but they do not resolve the problem of data silos: the enterprise still needs to populate its ERP system with high quality, trusted data.

How does PartLink work?

XSB has developed best-of-breed parts management technologies that are used by the United States Government and its major suppliers to manage parts at Web Scale. The XSB Master Data File (MDF) solution captures, maintains and leverages a single, trusted, accurate, current and complete view of component part data found throughout the organization, its customers, and its network of suppliers. XSB has created an automated system that generates a global product Master Data File. The result is a consistent and standardized set of identifiers and enriched product attributes that describe the core entities of an enterprise: customers, products, specifications and suppliers.

How does the technology work?

The solution takes advantage of semantic web technologies:

PartLink organizes enterprise part data in an ontology using MDF standardization engine and information on millions of parts, their suppliers, technical properties and processes that are used to produce them.

The parts ontology is deep and detailed, with over 10,000 categories and over 1,000 standardized attributes.

It uses the Semantic Web Resource Description Framework (RDF), publishing this parts data as a linked data model referencing a set of linked Web Resources with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).

The linked data model used by PartLink together with the MDF standardization engine allows to easily connect to new data sources.

The data is available via a SPARQL endpoint - for enterprise developers to build applications using a standard interface.